grep/regex can't find accented word

Question

I\'m trying mount a regex that get some words on a file where all letters of this word match with a word pattern.

My problem is, the regex can\'t find accented words

Answer 1

My problem is, the regex can't find accented words, but in my text file there are alot of accented words.

My command line is:

cat input/words.txt | grep '^[éra]\{1,4\}$' > output/words_era.txt
cat input/words.txt | grep '^[carroça]\{1,7\}$' > output/words_carroca.txt

[...]

How can I fix it?

Grep searches these files as if they are a stream of bytes (8-bit characters). These characters must be compliant to your current locale settings also.

It gets worse if your words.txt files are encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32. Or ISO-8859-1 (latin-1).

To handle all such encodings, use ugrep instead of grep to process files encoded in UTF and to match Unicode patterns:

cat input/words.txt | ugrep '^[éra]\{1,4\}$' > output/words_era.txt
cat input/words.txt | ugrep '^[carroça]\{1,7\}$' > output/words_carroca.txt

This produces output encoded in UTF-8. If the input files are encoded in ISO-8859-1, then use ugrep with option -QISO-8859-1. The ugrep output is always UTF-8, however.